7 ms·

Bots Are Hot (1996)

121 points by vincvinc 10y ago

shaohua 10y ago
"But one thing is certain: the numbers and varietiesof bots are exploding. The bot diaspora has begun."
wcummings 10y ago
Yeah, but it's different now. Now we have AI buzzwords!
- throwanem 10y ago
  We also have many orders of magnitude more computing power on which to implement the concepts behind those buzzwords. Maybe it'll make a difference.
seizethecheese 10y ago
WebVan -> Instacart, Amazon Fresh Napster -> Spotify Chatbots (1996) -> Chatbots (2016) Just because an idea failed, doesn't mean that it's resurrection is necessarily derivative or vacuous. Timing is everything, 20 years is a lifetime for applications of tech concepts.
- asimuvPR 10y ago
  Ideas never fail. Just the execution of them. Which heavily depends on a wide array of factors.
  - seizethecheese 10y ago
    That's a little pedantic. I would say that the idea includes the plan for execution, and in many cases perfect execution cannot resuscitate an idea that is too early.
    - asimuvPR 10y ago
      Its black and white (at least in my opinion). I have an idea for something. How I bring it to reality and under which circumstances will either tell if my execution of the idea fails or succeeds. But the idea is still there. In a sort of idea limbo of sorts.
- zeemonkee3 10y ago
  Given Instacart's recent problems, maybe sometimes a bad idea is just a bad idea.[1] [1] http://www.recode.net/2016/3/11/11586878/instacart-a-startup-worth-2-billion-slashes-pay-of-some-of-its-lowest http://www.recode.net/2016/3/11/11586878/instacart-a-startup...
ruddct 10y ago
Putting aside the nomenclature differences between 'bots' in today's media and bots in this article (defined, broadly, as a kind of helpful software), can someone tell me why entrepreneur/VC types are investing heavily in the ongoing submarine[0] that is 'bots'? Serious question; I completely fail to see why there would all of a sudden be a gold rush here. * There hasn't been some shiny new technology introduced (open source machine learning, maybe? Messengers with APIs have existed for a long time) * There isn't some massive consumer shift happening that's new (messaging has been around forever. It's been crazy popular outside the US for a long long time.) * There isn't some crazy new business model everyone's chasing * There hasn't been some crazy UX breakthrough that solves text interface problems (high learning curve, ambiguity about what the service can do) I can, however, understand why Facebook and Google want people to build bots on their new platform, hence the submarine reference. Any ideas? [0]http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
- namenotrequired 10y ago
  Messaging apps are old but perhaps it's messaging APIs of widely used platforms such as Slack that are new?
  - ruddct 10y ago
    That's how it's pitched, but I'm not sure if I buy it. AIM had over 50% US marketshare and had a ton of bots almost 10 years ago, and tech-y messaging services have dominated Asia for years.
    - herbst 10y ago
      In the more recent years and in my environment it was first mostly MSN and later more and more Skype. Suddenly it switched to a lot of Facebook and later mostly Whatsapp. None of these is bot friendly at all. Slack and Telegram have been a huge improvement for my daily automation needs.
- adamio 10y ago
  Improved voice recognition maybe, also bots could be a benefit for handicapped HCI/accessibility. But mostly I think the popularity is just self fueled hype
ben_jones 10y ago
As a teenager I ran a pretty high margin business operating botting software for a popular MMORPG. Bots would autonomously play characters in the game in order to "farm" items that could be sold to other players in the game. Virtual currency could then be transferred over a "black market" forum, usually with paypal as a medium. Just to be clear all this was legal, it merely took on the visage of "illegal" because it violated the TOS of the game and could you your in-game character(s) banned. The software was written by mostly teenagers and by all modern metrics was absolutely atrocious. It required constant maintenance, crashed all the time, and was riddled with bugs that would reveal your character as a bot and get it banned. But the exchange value for the virtual currency was so high it didn't matter, I was still making hand over fist. I didn't write any of the software I used at the time but it's a pretty frequent daydream of mine imagining the literal millions of dollars I could of made were I able to go back and re-write that software knowing everything about software development I know now. The beauty of bots is that they do not augment the productivity of the user like most software, they replace it with something that is a consistant multiplier better.
- gnahckire 10y ago
  Did the MMORPG happen to be Runescape or WoW?
  - ben_jones 10y ago
    Runescape circa ~2011. It was a once in a lifetime thing because tens of thousands of players were flocking back to the game because of new updates, and Jagex (the company behind the game) was selling out for an acquisition by Insight Ventures Partners, so they inflated their player base by vastly scaling back their anti-bot measures (mainly bans). Huge supply, meet huge demand. The Jagex founders (the Gower brothers) came away with $100m for the whole ordeal and power to them the technical achievements of the game (a browser-based MMO written in Java 2001 - present) was nothing short of remarkable [1]. [1]: https://youtu.be/yrVUegwSKlY https://youtu.be/yrVUegwSKlY
- cheez 10y ago
  As someone who has rewritten software with the benefit of hindsight and experience... I'm still in awe of how simple and functional my old (sometimes crashy) code was without any forethought.
api 10y ago
Someone tell me a bot I should try to become convinced bots are the next big thing.
8ig8 10y ago
Darn. I assumed this was about HotBot based on the title and date. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HotBot https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HotBot
- yolesaber 10y ago
  It is incredible to me that not only does that site still exist, but it has an Alexa ranking of 124,967 as of Feb 2016
PhasmaFelis 10y ago
Heh, 1996. I'm suddenly nostalgic for the era when the Net was new and Wired was still edgy and exciting, instead of just one more content mill.
ygmelnikova 10y ago
Spent a few years developing a bot with similar features to Alexa, called LFReD back in 1998. Was possible to carry on a conversation with LFReD via cordless phone, control lights, look up wikipedia articles etc. Idealabs approach me at one point offering to buy my botsinc.com dom. Two things killed development. The first was the quality of the speech recognition. 85% accuracy sounds impressive, but in real life, it's terrible, especially combined with background noise. (I had a love bird that would squawk every time i tried to train the recognizer :) The SR has only recently caught up enough to be acceptable (just). The other was the AI. Every 'rule' had to be hand coded. eg: "if SR = 'hello world' then tts 'hello'". I don't think they'll get past that last issue anytime soon, and I believe the Loebner prize is still very safe.

Bots Are Hot (1996)

121 points by vincvinc 10y ago

shaohua 10y ago

"But one thing is certain: the numbers and varietiesof bots are exploding. The bot diaspora has begun."

wcummings 10y ago

Yeah, but it's different now. Now we have AI buzzwords!

throwanem 10y ago
We also have many orders of magnitude more computing power on which to implement the concepts behind those buzzwords. Maybe it'll make a difference.

seizethecheese 10y ago

WebVan -> Instacart, Amazon Fresh Napster -> Spotify Chatbots (1996) -> Chatbots (2016) Just because an idea failed, doesn't mean that it's resurrection is necessarily derivative or vacuous. Timing is everything, 20 years is a lifetime for applications of tech concepts.

asimuvPR 10y ago
Ideas never fail. Just the execution of them. Which heavily depends on a wide array of factors.
- seizethecheese 10y ago
  That's a little pedantic. I would say that the idea includes the plan for execution, and in many cases perfect execution cannot resuscitate an idea that is too early.
  - asimuvPR 10y ago
    Its black and white (at least in my opinion). I have an idea for something. How I bring it to reality and under which circumstances will either tell if my execution of the idea fails or succeeds. But the idea is still there. In a sort of idea limbo of sorts.
zeemonkee3 10y ago
Given Instacart's recent problems, maybe sometimes a bad idea is just a bad idea.[1] [1] http://www.recode.net/2016/3/11/11586878/instacart-a-startup-worth-2-billion-slashes-pay-of-some-of-its-lowest http://www.recode.net/2016/3/11/11586878/instacart-a-startup...

ruddct 10y ago

Putting aside the nomenclature differences between 'bots' in today's media and bots in this article (defined, broadly, as a kind of helpful software), can someone tell me why entrepreneur/VC types are investing heavily in the ongoing submarine[0] that is 'bots'? Serious question; I completely fail to see why there would all of a sudden be a gold rush here. * There hasn't been some shiny new technology introduced (open source machine learning, maybe? Messengers with APIs have existed for a long time) * There isn't some massive consumer shift happening that's new (messaging has been around forever. It's been crazy popular outside the US for a long long time.) * There isn't some crazy new business model everyone's chasing * There hasn't been some crazy UX breakthrough that solves text interface problems (high learning curve, ambiguity about what the service can do) I can, however, understand why Facebook and Google want people to build bots on their new platform, hence the submarine reference. Any ideas? [0]http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

namenotrequired 10y ago
Messaging apps are old but perhaps it's messaging APIs of widely used platforms such as Slack that are new?
- ruddct 10y ago
  That's how it's pitched, but I'm not sure if I buy it. AIM had over 50% US marketshare and had a ton of bots almost 10 years ago, and tech-y messaging services have dominated Asia for years.
  - herbst 10y ago
    In the more recent years and in my environment it was first mostly MSN and later more and more Skype. Suddenly it switched to a lot of Facebook and later mostly Whatsapp. None of these is bot friendly at all. Slack and Telegram have been a huge improvement for my daily automation needs.
adamio 10y ago
Improved voice recognition maybe, also bots could be a benefit for handicapped HCI/accessibility. But mostly I think the popularity is just self fueled hype

ben_jones 10y ago

As a teenager I ran a pretty high margin business operating botting software for a popular MMORPG. Bots would autonomously play characters in the game in order to "farm" items that could be sold to other players in the game. Virtual currency could then be transferred over a "black market" forum, usually with paypal as a medium. Just to be clear all this was legal, it merely took on the visage of "illegal" because it violated the TOS of the game and could you your in-game character(s) banned. The software was written by mostly teenagers and by all modern metrics was absolutely atrocious. It required constant maintenance, crashed all the time, and was riddled with bugs that would reveal your character as a bot and get it banned. But the exchange value for the virtual currency was so high it didn't matter, I was still making hand over fist. I didn't write any of the software I used at the time but it's a pretty frequent daydream of mine imagining the literal millions of dollars I could of made were I able to go back and re-write that software knowing everything about software development I know now. The beauty of bots is that they do not augment the productivity of the user like most software, they replace it with something that is a consistant multiplier better.

gnahckire 10y ago
Did the MMORPG happen to be Runescape or WoW?
- ben_jones 10y ago
  Runescape circa ~2011. It was a once in a lifetime thing because tens of thousands of players were flocking back to the game because of new updates, and Jagex (the company behind the game) was selling out for an acquisition by Insight Ventures Partners, so they inflated their player base by vastly scaling back their anti-bot measures (mainly bans). Huge supply, meet huge demand. The Jagex founders (the Gower brothers) came away with $100m for the whole ordeal and power to them the technical achievements of the game (a browser-based MMO written in Java 2001 - present) was nothing short of remarkable [1]. [1]: https://youtu.be/yrVUegwSKlY https://youtu.be/yrVUegwSKlY
cheez 10y ago
As someone who has rewritten software with the benefit of hindsight and experience... I'm still in awe of how simple and functional my old (sometimes crashy) code was without any forethought.

api 10y ago

Someone tell me a bot I should try to become convinced bots are the next big thing.

8ig8 10y ago

Darn. I assumed this was about HotBot based on the title and date. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HotBot https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HotBot

yolesaber 10y ago
It is incredible to me that not only does that site still exist, but it has an Alexa ranking of 124,967 as of Feb 2016

PhasmaFelis 10y ago

Heh, 1996. I'm suddenly nostalgic for the era when the Net was new and Wired was still edgy and exciting, instead of just one more content mill.

ygmelnikova 10y ago

Spent a few years developing a bot with similar features to Alexa, called LFReD back in 1998. Was possible to carry on a conversation with LFReD via cordless phone, control lights, look up wikipedia articles etc. Idealabs approach me at one point offering to buy my botsinc.com dom. Two things killed development. The first was the quality of the speech recognition. 85% accuracy sounds impressive, but in real life, it's terrible, especially combined with background noise. (I had a love bird that would squawk every time i tried to train the recognizer :) The SR has only recently caught up enough to be acceptable (just). The other was the AI. Every 'rule' had to be hand coded. eg: "if SR = 'hello world' then tts 'hello'". I don't think they'll get past that last issue anytime soon, and I believe the Loebner prize is still very safe.